Selected Musical Works from 2013 - 2016

This manuscript is a collection of musical compositions written by Christian Newman while a graduate student at the University of New Mexico. Each musical work fulfills at least one composition portfolio requirement as stated in the 2012 – 2013 Music Theory/Composition Student Handbook: the basic requirements include a piece with large orchestration, a piece featuring the voice, a piece featuring electronics, and a collaborativepiece. Newman’s composition portfolio includes numerous works in addition to the requirements that illustrate the depth and consistency of his progress as a composer while a student in the program. The pieces included in this collection are Newman’s Prelude for Bass Trombone and Piano - “Kalki”, “A Piece on the Pianoforte”, “Every Drop” for Soprano and Mixed Ensemble, Prelude for Low Frequency Trio - “Eurynomos”, “Shadow Piece” in collaboration with Anna Mall, “Hot Summer Nights”- Electronic Instrumental Works for Mixed Ensemble, and “PRAEGRESSUS”- graphic notation scores and realization for wind symphony

The extended Conformal Einstein field equations with matter: the Einstein-Maxwell field

A discussion is given of the conformal Einstein field equations coupled with matter whose energy-momentum tensor is trace-free. These resulting equations are expressed in terms of a generic Weyl connection. The article shows how in the presence of matter it is possible to construct a conformal gauge which allows to know \emph{a priori} the location of the conformal boundary. In vacuum this gauge reduces to the so-called conformal Gaussian gauge. These ideas are applied to obtain: (i) a new proof of the stability of Einstein-Maxwell de Sitter-like spacetimes; (ii) a proof of the semi-global stability of purely radiative Einstein-Maxwell spacetimes.Comment: 29 page

Offdiagonal Complexity: A computationally quick complexity measure for graphs and networks

A vast variety of biological, social, and economical networks shows topologies drastically differing from random graphs; yet the quantitative characterization remains unsatisfactory from a conceptual point of view. Motivated from the discussion of small scale-free networks, a biased link distribution entropy is defined, which takes an extremum for a power law distribution. This approach is extended to the node-node link cross-distribution, whose nondiagonal elements characterize the graph structure beyond link distribution, cluster coefficient and average path length. From here a simple (and computationally cheap) complexity measure can be defined. This Offdiagonal Complexity (OdC) is proposed as a novel measure to characterize the complexity of an undirected graph, or network. While both for regular lattices and fully connected networks OdC is zero, it takes a moderately low value for a random graph and shows high values for apparently complex structures as scale-free networks and hierarchical trees. The Offdiagonal Complexity apporach is applied to the Helicobacter pylori protein interaction network and randomly rewired surrogates.Comment: 12 pages, revised version, to appear in Physica

Biomarkers of Wound Healing

The prevalence of conditions that eventually result in poor wound healing abounds as humans advance in age. With the increased possibility of wounds not healing comes a leap in morbidity and mortality with its accompanying socioeconomic impact. It is therefore relevant to understand what accounts for aberrant wound healing and more importantly the molecular markers involved in this pathological state. There are known events associated with the wound healing process, spanning from cellular involvement to the role of specific proteins such as cytokines and growth factors that are significant biomarkers in the wound healing process. This chapter discusses biomarkers relevant to the wound healing process, and these biomarkers go a long way to help identify and stratify nonhealing patients for whom biomarker-guided approaches may be of importance clinically in their management

On Preserving the Behavior in Software Refactoring: A Systematic Mapping Study

Context: Refactoring is the art of modifying the design of a system without altering its behavior. The idea is to reorganize variables, classes and methods to facilitate their future adaptations and comprehension. As the concept of behavior preservation is fundamental for refactoring, several studies, using formal verification, language transformation and dynamic analysis, have been proposed to monitor the execution of refactoring operations and their impact on the program semantics. However, there is no existing study that examines the available behavior preservation strategies for each refactoring operation. Objective: This paper identifies behavior preservation approaches in the research literature. Method: We conduct, in this paper, a systematic mapping study, to capture all existing behavior preservation approaches that we classify based on several criteria including their methodology, applicability, and their degree of automation. Results: The results indicate that several behavior preservation approaches have been proposed in the literature. The approaches vary between using formalisms and techniques, developing automatic refactoring safety tools, and performing a manual analysis of the source code. Conclusion: Our taxonomy reveals that there exist some types of refactoring operations whose behavior preservation is under-researched. Our classification also indicates that several possible strategies can be combined to better detect any violation of the program semantics

Mechanism of Action of Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs

The use of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) dates back to thousands of years when man used natural sources of these agents in a lot of pain and inflammatory conditions. The tone for modern day discovery and use of NSAIDs was set with the discovery of aspirin. Today in addition to aspirin, a host of other NSAIDs of varying potency and efficacy is employed in the management of pain and inflammatory conditions. This chapter looks with key interest in the existing and evolving role of NSAIDs in therapeutics with emphasis on the current insights into their mechanism of action and side effect profiles associated with its use in pain and inflammation as well as its potential therapeutic benefits in cancer chemotherapy

Characterisation Studies of Silicon Photomultipliers

This paper describes an experimental setup that has been developed to measure and characterise properties of Silicon Photomultipliers (SiPM). The measured SiPM properties are of general interest for a multitude of potential applications and comprise the Photon Detection Efficiency (PDE), the voltage dependent cross-talk and the after-pulse probabilities. With the described setup the absolute PDE can be determined as a function of wavelength covering a spectral range from 350 to 1000nm. In addition, a method is presented which allows to study the pixel uniformity in terms of the spatial variations of sensitivity and gain. The results from various commercially available SiPMs - three HAMAMATSU MPPCs and one SensL SPM - are presented and compared.Comment: 11 pages, 21 figures, submitted to Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section

A Study on Developer Perception of Transformation Languages for Refactoring

Although there is much research advancing state-of-art of program transformation tools, their application in industry source code change problems has not yet been gauged. In this context, the purpose of this paper is to better understand developer familiarity and comfort with these languages by conducting a survey. It poses, and answers, four research questions to understand how frequently source code transformation languages are applied to refactoring tasks, how well-known these languages are in industry, what developers think are obstacles to adoption, and what developer refactoring habits tell us about their current use, or underuse, of transformation languages. The results show that while source code transformation languages can fill a needed niche in refactoring, research must motivate their application. We provide explanations and insights based on data, aimed at the program transformation and refactoring communities, with a goal to motivate future research and ultimately improve industry adoption of transformation languages for refactoring tasks